inspired by zach lieberman inspired by zach lieberman inspired by zach lieberman zach lieberman

After two decades on .com , my blog and retro corner have a new domain! Introducing: https://www.rubenerd.au/ https://www.rubenerd.au/feed/ http://retro.rubenerd.au/ .au is the top-level domain for Australia and its various dependencies. It’s the elemental symbol for gold, two letters that are on almost opposite sites of the Latin alphabet, and the verbiage people of a certain persuasion exclaim to get your attention. AYE, YOU. This is so the first geographical top-level domain ...

In fall 2024, the best-selling author and historian Yuval Noah Harari went on the talk show Morning Joe. “Let me tell you one small story,” he said. “When OpenAI developed GPT-4, they wanted to test what this thing can do. So they gave it a test to solve captcha puzzles.” Those are the visual puzzles — warped numbers and letters — that prove to a website that you’re not a robot. GPT-4 couldn’t… Source In fall 2024, the best-selling author and historian Yuval Noah Harari went...

Initially, we had languages like Fortran (1957), Pascal (1970), and C (1972). Fortran was designed for number crunching and scientific computing. Pascal was restrictive with respect to low-level access (it was deliberately “safe”, as meant for teaching structured programming). So C won out as a language that allowed low-level/unsafe programming (pointer arithmetic, direct memory access) while remaining general-purpose enough for systems work like Unix. To be fair, Pascal had descendants that...

I posted about using the Banach-Tarski Paradox(BT)  to explain the miracle of Loaves and Fishes (LF)  here . Darling says that whenever I fool my readers or my students then I have to tell them later, so I'll tell you now: The story about me meeting with Pope and talking about the BT Paradox (that would be a good name for a rock band: B-T-Paradox) was not true. I think my readers know that.   1) I first learned the Banach-Tarski Paradox as a grad student in 1981 when I read Hillary Putnam's a...

I was inspired by, of all things, a video monologue by a Scottish surfer [1] who said that the future for them was challenging themselves in new ways. My guitar was close by and I thought maybe I should give myself a bit of a challenge too. I picked up my guitar and looked up a tutorial on how to do finger picking. The first video I found was a bit challenging. I looked for another that was easier. The one I found was a tutorial showing how to play How did it end? by Taylor Swift, a song ...

Why logging at every layer of a service produces noise, and how to log only at the handler level while propagating context from below. Why logging at every layer of a service produces noise, and how to log only at the handler level while propagating context from below.

The Artemis II launch, its four astronauts prior to liftoff, people cheering the launch, and the crew’s Orion spacecraft and its beautiful view of a crescent Earth. The flight crew from left to right: Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen , Pilot Victor Glover , Mission Specialist Christina Koch , and Commander Reid Wiseman . Images: NASA At long last, that moment is here. Humans have visited our Moon again, ending a five-decade absence since Apollo. Four astronauts launched by NASA on Ap...

Antarctic snow cruiser circa 1939, via Historyland . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at whether the Strait of Hormuz is open yet, building code cost benefit analysis, Intel joining Terafab, sponge cities, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. War in Iran A two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran was announced earl...

“Gandalf, my old friend, this will be a night to remember.” ― The Lord of the Rings The next three days of my journey, I've spent in and around Twizel. This region is called the Mackenzie Basin, which includes a few popular tourist spots. It's also where my friends from Germany now live, and I was excited to see them again after a long time! On my way to Twizel, I've made a few stops. First, I've checked out the Moeraki Boulders . Fortunately, it was only a short detour, as I ...

As I already mentioned in oh so many blog posts, I now live in a house, which opens totally new possibilities when doing astrophography. I no longer have to drive a long way just to get to the spot, and then spend hours either outside in the cold, or in a small shed. Now all I need is to carry out the equipment in the evening, do the setup and polar alignment when it gets acceptably dark, and then sit comfortably on the couch and control the session from the inside. Which means I can do much lon...

After cobbling together my own eval for Claude , I was interested to discover harbor . It’s described as: A framework for evaluating and optimizing agents and models in container environments. Which sounds kinda cool, right? After cobbling together my own eval for Claude , I was interested to discover harbor . It’s described as: A framework for evaluating and optimizing agents and models in container environments. Which sounds kinda cool, right? After...

Meta announced Muse Spark today, their first model release since Llama 4 almost exactly a year ago . It's hosted, not open weights, and the API is currently "a private API preview to select users", but you can try it out today on meta.ai (Facebook or Instagram login required). Meta's self-reported benchmarks show it competitive with Opus 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT 5.4 on selected benchmarks, though notably behind on Terminal-Bench 2.0. Meta themselves say they "continue to invest in are...

Today I’m very happy to share that Mario Zechner is joining Earendil . First things first: I think you should read Mario’s post . This is his news more than it is ours, and he tells his side of it better than I could. What I want to do here is add a more personal note about why this matters so much to me, how the last months led us here, and why I am so excited to have him on board. Last year changed the way many of us thought about software. It certainly changed the way I did. I s...

I love sampling algorithms. Here's the sampling algorithm that I find most magical. We want to generate a subset of {1, 2, ..., n} of size k . def floyd ( n , k ): s = set () for i in range ( n - k + 1 , n + 1 ): t = random . randint ( 1 , i ) if t in s : s . add ( i ) else : s . add ( t ) return s I learned about this algorithm the canonical way all good algorithm lore ...

Six months after we standardized on OpenSearch, a pull request introduced Datadog into a service. The ADR existed. It had been discussed, approved, and stored in the repo. The PR was still green. That is architecture drift. Not because engineers are careless. Because memory does not scale across hundreds of people and dozens of repositories. After we started checking ADRs in CI, we caught several violations like this in the first month and dozens more in the first quarter before they reach...

The global standing desk market reached $8.6 billion in 2025 and is on track to hit $9.1 billion in 2026, according to Global Market Insights. More than 24 million office setups worldwide now include a standing or sit-stand desk, and that number keeps climbing as hybrid work reshapes how people think about their workspaces. This article pulls together the latest user data, market figures, health research, and regional trends in one place. Standing Desk User Statistics: Key Numbers for 2026 ...

I just published my motorbike servicing rant and went over to my Pure Blog Dashboard to take a look at some stats, when I noticed this: 101 posts in the last year; which means I've complete 100 Days to Offload for a second time! 🎉 The whole point of the #100DaysToOffload is to challenge you to publish 100 posts on your personal blog in a year. Mission accomplished! If you're interested in taking part in the challenge too, make sure you get yourself added to the hall of fa...

The Fediverse deserves a dumb graphical client 2026-04-09 18:30 I love the Fediverse. I have been on it for years, and it remains the only social network where I actually enjoy spending time. No algorithmic feed pushing outrage, no dark patterns, no surveillance capitalism. Just people talking to each other over an open protocol. But every time I wanted to recommend it to someone, I ran into the same wall: the clients are heavy. Mastodon's web interface ships megabytes of JavaScript. Elk, ...

I'm happy to announce the general availability of watgo - the W eb A ssembly T oolkit for G o. This project is similar to wabt (C++) or wasm-tools (Rust), but in pure, zero-dependency Go. watgo comes with a CLI and a Go API to parse WAT (WebAssembly Text), validate it, and encode it into WASM binaries; it also supports decoding WASM from its binary format. At the center of it all is wasmir - a semantic representation of a WebAssembly module that users can examine (and manipulate)....

The newest zine from my research group, “Carol’s Causal Conundrum”, is out today! You can read it online, or print your own free copies to read offline ! This zine is an introduction to causally ordered message delivery , a fundamental abstraction for distributed programming. It’s the result of a six-month collaboration between my student collaborator, Ayush Manocha, and me. In the zine, we talk about what exactly causally ordered message delivery is, what problem it solves, and a...

For-profit businesses weren’t the focus of the workshop I planned to create , but there is a lot to learn from the literature on how to shut companies down. See the entire series: Lessons from Disaster Management Lessons from MAID Lessons from Crisis Lessons from Business Organisational Decline Is Not a Single Event Whetten1980 argued that management science had almost entirely ignored organizational decline in favour of growth. WeitzelJonsson1989 extended this into a...

CMake has a --debugger mode since 3.27 (July 2023), allowing software to manipulate it interactively through the Debugger Adaptor Protocol (DAP), an HTTP-like protocol passing JSON messages. Debugger front-ends can start, stop, step, breakpoint, query variables, etc. a live CMake. When I came across this mode, I immediately conceived a project putting it to use. Thanks to recent leaps in software engineering productivity , I had a working prototype in 30 minutes, and by the end of that s...